Discourse Features of Chinese-Speaking Seniors with and without Alzheimer’s Disease *

Abstract

Empirical studies on the discourse of persons with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have revealed that appropriate language usage in context becomes more impaired and the communicative ability gradually deteriorates over the course of the disease. Despite the growing research interest in AD discourse patterns, there are still open questions. Up to the present time, few studies have addressed the predictive power of discourse features for the severity of Alzheimer’s dementia. Also, little attention has been drawn to the linguistic features in Mandarin Chinese-speaking persons with AD’s discourse. This study intends to describe discourse patterns produced by 20 AD participants and 20 healthy elderly controls in a Chinese-speaking society. Forty transcripts of interview style conversations were analyzed. Discourse patterns were examined in light of discourse-building features and discourse-impairing features. Semantic and pragmatic aspects in oral revisions are also discussed. Results indicate that fewer discourse-building features but more discourse-impairing features were found in conversations of the elderly with AD compared to the healthy controls. Discourse-impairing variables correlate significantly more with the degrees of dementia than with the discourse-building variables. Especially, revisions and no global coherence were significantly associated with the severity of Alzheimer’s dementia for the Chinese-speaking population in Taiwan.